Sakes Astrophotography

05/28/2026

Caught some lightning a few days back coming back from the airport at 5 AM.

04/18/2026

There are about 8-10K astrophysicists in the world. I had the opportunity to listen to my favorite one in person last night! He's mathematically 1 in a million!

Such a great experience seeing Neil deGrasse Tyson 🫡 at Jones Hall for the Performing Arts

04/03/2026

This just in—more images of Earth from Artemis II! 🤩

This view shows the divide between night and day, also known as the terminator, as seen from the Orion capsule.

04/03/2026

04/03/2026

💯👌🏾

That's us! 🌍

The Artemis II crew captured beautiful, high-resolution images of our home planet during their journey to the Moon. As astronaut Christina Koch put it: "You guys look great."

03/31/2026

The countdown begins! Launch is scheduled for April 1st at 5:24 Central Time.

Countdown has started for launch.

The launch control team recently arrived at their stations and the official countdown for the launch of the Artemis II mission began at 4:44 p.m. EDT (2044 UTC). Teams will begin methodically going through the launch countdown checklist to prepare for the liftoff of the crewed lunar mission — currently scheduled for no earlier than 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 UTC) on Wednesday, April 1.

The forecast shows an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions. https://go.nasa.gov/4sL4j3x

03/23/2026

Snagged a few quick pics from my S25 Ultra and thought I'd share some knowledge!

Ever heard of the term "albedo"? An object's albedo refers to its reflectivity of light. An object with an abeldo of 1 reflects all of the light hitting it. An object with 0 absorbs all the light and reflects none.

Our Earth has an average albedo of 0.3 with areas with snow having a much higher albedo of around 0.85! The moon's albedo is around 0.1 so it absorbs 90% of light.

In these pictures, the bright section of the moon is the 10% of sunlight that is being reflected by the moon. The other 90% is being absorbed!

The darker section you're seeing is what is referred to as "Earthshine". Since the Earth is much larger than the moon and it is albedo is 3 times that of the moon, 30% of the sunlight hitting the "day side" of the Earth is being reflected back into space of which some is landing on the moon. This is then being reflected back to Earth and this is what we see!

Here's an explainer from StarTalk (my favorite podcast by light-years!)

https://youtu.be/pJ0GQYiBg_U?si=qJXL4UPLUq8vYuPP

☀️ ➡️ 🌎 ➡️ 🌙 ➡️ 🌎